The main purpose of this forum is to provide support to developers using the Iam Framework for Blue Mars. But we welcome anybody looking for a place to discuss Artificial Intelligence or Robotics in its broadest sense.

Blue Mars is the brain-child of Henk Rogers. One of his goals in life is to make a backup of Earth. Just in case we happen to destroy the one we currently live on. Possibly this will happen through the colonization and terraforming of Mars or another suitable planet. But since that is still very far away, Henk decided to start by making a virtual copy, Blue Mars, which is a virtual world based on a state-of-the-art 3D graphics engine and aims at providing an unprecedented virtual experience online. More on Blue Mars can be found here: http://www.bluemarsonline.com

As an extension of that dream, making a backup of Earth, is making a backup of ourselves. Thereby achieving a certain level of immortality. This will have to be accomplished by developments in A.I. Since it would be naive to think we could get there by locking up a few programmers in an office for a few years, no matter how brilliant they are, and have them come up with the ultimate A.I., we decided to focus on an open development framework instead. Something that would make it as easy as possible for anyone to start programming an artificial brain for the brainless avatars generally inhabiting virtual worlds. And we literally mean anyone.

So we present here the Iam Framework. A fair amount of programming skill is still required to use it to create the autonomous avatars we call Iams. But over time we plan to add more and more tools to support and facilitate the building of artificial brains. And hopefully we'll be able to inspire others to use it and maybe even contribute to the evolution of this framework.

For those rearing to jump into it, please refer to the Wiki that contains all the documentation concerning the Iam Framework: http://ai.bluemar.com/wiki

Discussions about your experience or troubles with the framework should be posted to this forum. We do have a Bugzilla setup here: http://ai.bluemars.com/bugs

but generally we believe it only helps everybody if all problems and their solutions are all published on an open forum for everyone to see.

We are planning to add as much documentation and as many features to the framework as possible. This is just our first step. The first Iams will be less intelligent than insects. But by enabling large numbers of people to experiment and try out ideas we hope they'll evolve into something ever more sophisticated.